The Slasher Series: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Returning to the worst family dinner ever.

A few years back, I published a series of Halloween-related articles about the first appearances of iconic movie slashers. That site is no longer around, but I enjoyed the articles that came out of it, so as a special October treat, I’m going to publish them until Halloween.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is rotten. 

That’s not a statement of quality; it’s a description of how the movie feels. Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic is sweaty, decaying and oppressive. In the Sawyer home, with its bone chairs and face lamps, you can practically smell the rotting flesh and putrid meat. Four decades and several awful sequels and remakes later, the film still feels transgressive. 

The setup is simple. In 1973, a group of teens runs out of gas while driving through the backwoods of Texas. Sally, Jerry, Kirk, Pam and wheelchair-bound Franklin encounter a brutal house of horrors and its vicious residents, the cannibalistic Sawyer clan. Most notably, they make the acquaintance of Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), a hulking monster who wears masks made of his victims’ skin and treats trespassers no different than cattle ready to be slaughtered. 

Despite its horrific premise, the film is famously non-gory (Hooper initially aimed for a PG rating; instead, he was given an X and only earned an R after making a few trims). There’s little blood, and the most horrific violence takes place off screen. It doesn’t matter; the ideas are so revolting and Hooper’s direction so claustrophobic that finishing the film feels like an endurance test. 

Inspired in part by the crimes of serial killer Ed Gein  — who was also the inspiration for Norman Bates —  The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the product of a culture coming apart at the seams. Like much of the public, Hooper was enraged at a dishonest government and disturbed by the wartime atrocities displayed on television. The film’s opening shots of solar flares and voiceover news reports of disturbing crimes create an apocalyptic setting. Even seemingly banal sequences — such as a visit to Franklin’s grandfather’s old homestead —  have an air of menace, with nature creeping back over the landscape and packs of spiders in a frenzy on the walls. 

The film was a low-budget affair, produced for less than $140,000. With its largely amateur cast and no-frills cinematography, it often feels like a documentary, heightening the intensity when the horror picks up. The production was filmed over long hours in a sweltering farmhouse, meaning the sweat and exhaustion —  and often, the frayed nerves — on screen are real; in a few cases, due to the seat-of-the-pants nature of the production, so was the blood. 

Structurally, the film isn’t much different than any other slasher. A van breaks down. The kids wander to a dangerous home and they’re picked off one by one. The central protagonists aren’t exactly memorable. Aside from Marilyn Burns’ ferocious performance as final girl Sally, the rest of the cast of innocents is forgettable at best, distractingly amateur at worst (Paul Partain’s Franklin could be interesting, but Partain’s whining is like nails on a chalkboard). 

But unlike a traditional slasher, there’s an non-stop intensity and brutality to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Leatherface doesn’t stalk his victims like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers; he bashes them with a sledgehammer or hangs them on a meat hook. Hooper lets the chase sequences run for several minutes, never giving Sally a moment of reprieve. The film’s climactic dinner scene is a surreal masterpiece, with claustrophobic cinematography and nightmarish set design creating lending an unbearable intensity. 

In a series about the debuts of horror villains, it’s essential to talk about Leatherface. It’s easy to see why 40 years later, they’re still making movies about him. He gets one of the most shocking and abrupt entrances in slasher history, and the character design is instantly iconic. Hansen plays him as a blank, his personality coming out based on what mask he’s using. There’s a chilling implication that he’s simple-minded, with a curdled innocence. When the teens venture into his home, he’s simply cooking, and he’s revealed to be the dumb sibling in a messed-up family. 

On his own, Leatherface is a threat. But it’s as part of the demented Sawyer family that he’s truly terrifying. As Sally is tied up and forced to sit at the family table, she watches as their dynamics play out in a mix of surreal horror and black comedy. There’s the sibling bickering between Leatherface (dolled up in a mask with a woman’s face, complete with lipstick and perm) and the sadistic hitchhiker we met earlier. There’s the father, who also runs the town barbecue, apologetically telling Sally that he doesn’t like killing, but he’s got a job to do. And then there’s the grandfather, who gets the most chilling moment in the entire film. This display is a perversion of domestic life; it would be funny if it weren’t so deeply unsettling. Perhaps part of the reason the sequels never maintained the original’s visceral power is that they focused too much on Leatherface and not enough on the warped family that considered this all normal. 

Hooper doesn’t let up the throttle in the final moments, and Sally’s last dash toward freedom is excruciating, with moments of shocking violence and a final confrontation staged with all the clumsiness of real life. Even though Sally survives, it’s hard to call the ending happy. She’s traumatized, her friends are dead, and the world is still decaying. Hooper ends the film not with a shot of our hero safely escaped but with the villain howling in rage, dancing with his chainsaw in the rising sun. 

Certain horror classics have lost their ability to terrify, thanks to familiarity and a slew of imitators. But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre maintains its unnerving tension and visceral horror almost 50 years later. It’s one of the rare horror films to actually horrify.